"I have my piece of the pie"This is a phrase that always bothered me, talking about getting one's own piece of the pie. I don't mind the selfishness of it, after all, people do need to look out for themselves. What bothers me is that it implies a limited size: "I have my piece and what do I care about you?" Imagine if everyone needs one piece, nine people, and only eight pieces available; they'd grab their pieces and act as if they are better than the person with no piece, which just the plain reality dictates that someone will lack a piece. This is of course when the pieless person murders everyone else and lives it up until someone else comes along looking for pie. That analogy got a little too true to real life.

Gold

Or to put it in WoW terms: People often act like they're so great because they have tons of gold through activities which create no gold, but instead transfer it: crafting, AH manipulation, and farming. Crafting and farming have their place and are essential, but to hold them up as the only intelligent activities is to neglect the truth: Gold must come from somewhere. Dailies, mob looting, vendors: these are not fast gold, but they are necessary. Without them, there's no gold to trade for items and everything falls apart. Arguably they are done in excess, as is evident by their relatively low gold/hour, but the activity itself is essential.

The arrogant rich players have theirs and don't care how they got it. Perhaps they are the stupid ones for failing to recognize that their activities only decrease the gold supply; meaning that for a given input of gold per day, fewer people can become rich. In effect their piece of the pie doesn't just deprive someone else of that piece, it actually reduced the total available pie.

Fucking assholes taking away pie. What's next, no cake?

Tanking

But this wasn't the point of my post. Instead I want to talk about my piece of pie. I have instant queues as a tank. In this case, I actually can act superior; at least over the DKs, druids, paladins, and warriors. Why? Because my piece of the pie isn't exclusive. They can have the exact same piece as me if they choose to have it. And this piece of pie actually makes more pieces.

In other words, for every tank/healer that queues, three more DPS get in. That's three more pieces of pie. And this is a sustainable process; we could all have near-instant queues if our chosen roles matched the 1-1-3 ratio of heroics. There's enough pie for everyone, there just are a lot of people who don't want it, and when they do finally get it, it is at the expense of others.

What I'm trying to say is this: Queue as a healer/tank and we'll all have a ton of pie.

P.S. This post was not written as a response to anything in the last few days, but I suppose it could have some applicability. I wrote in on Monday or so with tanking as my primary thought.

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comments:

Re Gold: Too true! The NPC's are hiding huge amounts of gold in a bag where the guards won't find it, then they give it to people for mercilessly slaying some peaceful murlocs. Gold does not grow on trees, it comes from NPC's.

The rich and infamous have failed to remember their humble roots with their first toon, where in their starting area they learned that it was those peaceful NPC's that is the source of all gold in wow.